This essay from Richard Seymour intersected in a thought provoking way with my recent concerns about the securitisation of pandemic response. He explains how this paradigm involves preparation rather than prevention, in the senes of preparing for the inevitability of a range of disastrous outcomes rather than trying to bring […]
I found this description by Mike Davis on loc 1073 of The Monster Enters helpful for understanding the particular pressures which a pandemic places on the healthcare system. In spite of the tendency to reduce this to a matter of beds within the system, as can be seen in the […]
From Mike Davis in The Monster Enters loc 200-215: Since the discovery of the HIV virus in 1983 and the recognition that it had jumped from apes to humans, science has been on high alert against the appearance of deadly new diseases with pandemic potential that have crossed over from wild […]
This is a chilling warning from Mike Davis in The Monster Enters. My understanding is this hasn’t been borne out by events since the time he was writing this (pre-June 2020) however I’d welcome any suggestions of literature on this topic which readers might have. It seems inescapable that the […]
There’s a brief aside towards the end of Apollo’s Arrow which was intended as innocuous but in practice is unsettling. Nicholas Christakis draws a comparison between the potential impact of COVID-19 and other crises which have had a long-lasting influence upon social life. From pg 322: The COVID-19 pandemic awakened […]
This was another really interesting discussion in Apollo’s Arrow: The Profound and Enduring Impact of Coronavirus on the Way We Live by Nicholas Christakis. He considers the particular characteristics of Covid-19 which have lent it an almost spectral quality in many people’s experience, lurking on the horizon of their lives as […]
I thought this was really interesting in Apollo’s Arrow: The Profound and Enduring Impact of Coronavirus on the Way We Live. I’m not sure I completely agree with these categories from Nicholas Christakis but I think it’s a useful undertaking to begin to conceptualise the contours of this transition. From […]
I’ve been thinking a lot about this in the last few days, as a result of recognising the sense in which the anti-lockdown case is sometimes dismissed as a matter of liberal common sense without a real engagement with the arguments. This is an initial attempt to seriously engage with […]
From Apollo’s Arrow: The Profound and Enduring Impact of Coronavirus on the Way We Live by Nicholas Christakis, pg 29-30: The world is quite different now than it was during prior plagues; today we have exceedingly dense cities, electronic technology, modern medicine, better material circumstances, and the ability to know […]
Organised by Mark Carrigan, Ibrar Bhatt and Jeremy Knox In only a few months, the world has been transformed beyond recognition by Covid-19. As we face the prospect of many months, even years, until a vaccine can be produced and distributed, it seems increasingly clear there will be no return […]
I’m slowly getting my head around how the arrangement of agriculture, with its co-ordination of animals in time and space, creates the conditions in which viruses are incubated, as Catharine Arnold explains in her Pandemic 1918: Little did doctors suspect, during the First World War, that ducks operated as a ‘reservoir’ […]
This is the last thing I’ll post about Žižek’s Pandemic! eBook but I thought these observations about what I’ve come to think of as Covid temporalities, the distinct temporal experiences of crisis and lockdown, were very useful. On loc 396 he considers the inevitability of ‘dead time’ during those who […]
A really important argument from Richard Seymour’s latest Patreon blog post: The geo-economics of particle conveyance, is an industrial byproduct of agribusiness. The concentration and centralisation of agricultural capital results in unprecedentedly large farm sizes, with big, sedentary animal populations intensifying virulence. The imperative to streamline production where profit margins are often very […]
I thought this extract from Ulrich Beck’s final book Metamorphosis shed light on our current situation. The role of expert systems in rendering the crisis legible is familiar, with “the means to make the invisible threat to their life visible” lying in the mediation of events. The obvious different though […]
